BUILDING THE 
CONGREGATION 



W. C SKEATH 




Class \L , 



Book. 



— 



Copyright^ . 



CDPXRIGRT DEPOSm 



BUILDING THE 
CONGREGATION 



A STUDY 
OF APPEALS 



W. C. SKEATH 



H 



THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1919, by 
W. C. SKEATH 



AUG i 8 ' 



OCIA529607 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. The Objective of the Church 5 

II. A Variety of Appeals 11 

III. A Basis for Appeal 29 

IV. The Appeal Utilized 43 

V. Conclusion 57 



I. THE OBJECTIVE OF THE 
CHURCH 

The words "audience" and "congre- 
gation" are not synonymous, though 
frequently so used. Both signify gath- 
erings of persons at a specially desig- 
nated place for a definite purpose, but 
a congregation differs from an audience 
in the more specific content of the pur- 
pose for which they are gathered. The 
functioning organ of an audience is 
primarily the ear; that of the congre- 
gation is the heart. A congregation is 
a gathering whose essential purpose is 
to engage in acts of worship; and per- 
sons composing a congregation are lis- 
teners only in proportion as the music, 
the address, or singing to which they 
give their attention is thought of as a 
part of such worship, or as so instruct- 
ing the worshiper as to give a deeper 
meaning and a greater efficiency to his 
worship. Not only has a congregation 
5 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

this more limited purpose, but it has 
an element of permanence which cannot 
be supposed to inhere in an audience. 
The concert, the lecture, the oratorio 
are things which are of passing interest. 
Their rendition accomplished, they 
have served their purpose of mental 
stimulation or of entertainment and 
pass on to some other field. It is dif- 
ferent with worship, which carries with 
it an idea of continuance. Worship is 
ordinarily thought of as having a con- 
tinual claim on the individual, a claim 
which cannot be satisfied in an hour of 
time, but is, supposedly, a real part of 
the life plan of the worshiper. 

This distinction between an audience 
and a congregation must be kept in 
mind in any consideration of the ob- 
jective of the church. No matter what 
may be the form of doctrine or type of 
truth stressed by any denomination or 
sect, the ultimate object of its efforts 
must not merely be the assembling of 
audiences; it must be the building of a 
6 



OBJECTIVE OF THE CHURCH 

congregation which shall so sufficiently 
believe these doctrines as to live by 
them. An audience is soon dissipated; 
and if there is to be a permanence to 
the work, the impulse to attend its 
gatherings must be such an impulse as 
will give to the service of the church a 
continuity such as, for example, is not 
found in the theater or lecture plat- 
form audiences; and such an impulse, 
further, as will assist in the general 
effort of making church attendance a 
habitual part of the individual's life. 
In the pursuit of this, which is the real 
objective of the church, elaborate or- 
ganizations have been formed, vast 
sums of money expended, commodious 
buildings erected, and great social agen- 
cies brought into being. The church 
always has realized that it must not 
only proclaim what it has considered 
needful truth, but that this needful 
truth must be so proclaimed as to be 
heard by an increasing number of ad- 
herents — a number, further, whose 
7 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

growth must be commensurate, not 
alone with holding its own, but with 
adequately impressing the increasing 
population so that a greater and greater 
percentage of the community may 
come under the influence of the pe- 
culiar religion taught and abide by its 
precepts. It presupposes a certain need 
in both the individual and the race, a 
need undying from age to age, increas- 
ing with the increasing complexity of 
life, and which can be met only by a 
continuous and increasing dedication 
of life to the specific answers proposed 
by the church for those needs. 

Now, it is precisely this necessity for 
accumulating an increasing number of 
adherents which has constituted a very 
real problem for organized Protestant- 
ism. It is a question whether any na- 
tion can be divided strictly into saint 
and sinner. The faith of all peoples is 
colored by the particular religion which 
has been received by tradition and in- 
heritance, and even missionary effort 
8 



OBJECTIVE OF THE CHURCH 

must take cognizance of this since the 
convert must accept the new faith 
largely in terms of his concept of the 
old. The better classification would be 
into the actively religious and the pas- 
sively religious — by passively religious 
meaning, of course, that element of the 
population which accepts the current 
conceptions of the God generally 
preached but in no real sense worship- 
ing them. It is true, as Leuba says, 
"that in every society there is always a 
large number of people who live in the 
limbo of organized religion. They are 
open to the influence of religious agents 
in whom they believe more or less cold- 
heartedly without entering into definite 
or fixed relations with them. 55 And this 
passivity, in our present time certainly, 
continues in varying degree up to the 
very center of the church itself. To 
transform this passive element into an 
active constituency; to make over this 
mass of people who have inherited the 
religious traditions and teachings of 
9 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

their race without becoming active 
participants in and workers for these 
teachings, has been the task to which 
the church of whatever form has had 
to address herself. Such terms as 
awakening the sinner, spreading the 
truth, etc., have been symbols under 
which the church has conceived its 
task of turning this mass of indifference 
into the warmth of a worshiping con- 
gregation. It is our purpose now to 
consider some of the methods by which 
the church has addressed herself to 
this task. 



10 



II. A VARIETY OF APPEALS 

This study is not concerned with the 
various dogmas of Protestant sects nor 
the validity of those dogmas. It does 
recognize, however, that whatever their 
difference of doctrine, they have, in the 
matter we are considering, a similar 
problem, and that, to a degree, the 
methods of solution have been common 
to all. 

Preaching 
What probably ought to receive our 
first attention is the method of preach- 
ing the doctrines of the denomination 
in organized services. The validity of 
the method under certain conditions 
must be acknowledged. If the par- 
ticular doctrines preached or believed in 
be such as will meet a real or supposed 
need on the part of the population; if, 
further, they be joined to certain social 
and psychological conditions suited for 
11 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

their acceptance, no better way can be 
secured than this for the gathering of 
a congregation. The persons to whose 
peculiar temperament the teaching is 
suited, recognizing its validity, will give 
their adherence to its principles, and a 
congregation will result. These ele- 
ments have been — though they may 
not now be — in the problem. In the 
beginning of Protestantism the masses 
received from it a new and higher con- 
ception of God than was in the old 
teaching. The teaching was further 
enforced by martyrdom, a most start- 
ling way of bringing it to the attention 
of men. There were certain social and 
psychological conditions extremely fa- 
vorable. The paucity of opportunity 
for social intercourse save as offered by 
the services of the church; the prev- 
alence of the fear idea, upon which in 
its appeal to future punishment the 
teachings were grounded; all these 
things gave preaching a very valid and 
growing hold upon communities and 
12 



A VARIETY OF APPEALS 

made it valid in the building of con- 
gregations. 

The drawing power of preaching 
to-day is open to question. To say 
this is not to question the character of 
the preaching of to-day nor the strength 
of the argument or appeal used in 
present-day sermons, upon what is es- 
teemed as valid truth. It is simply to 
say that as a method of attracting per- 
sons to a gathering it has lost its old- 
time power. It is simply to assert that 
while the preaching may be valid in 
the instruction of a congregation once 
gathered, it is of little force in the gath- 
ering of the congregation primarily. 
People are not generally attracted by 
the announcement of a preacher nor of 
his subjects unless the speaker be so 
unusual and widely known a character 
as to attach to himself an unusual in- 
terest, or the subject so bizarre and 
sensational as to fall outside the rank 
of accepted' standards. Those persons 
who are sometimes heard to say that 
13 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

people will crowd to hear the preaching 
of what they are pleased to call the 
"old gospel 55 are still looking for a 
form of the miraculous which has been 
relegated to the limbo of superstition. 
Of course there will be brought to our 
attention at once the great tabernacle 
campaigns. And these will be pointed 
out as a proof of the drawing power of 
the preaching of the old doctrines, and 
the power of such preaching to trans- 
form the multitudes thus gathered into 
a congregation. In reply it may be 
said that it's true such campaigns do 
draw large crowds; but these crowds 
are more likely the result of a careful 
and intelligent press work, joined to a 
public curiosity aroused by the personal 
peculiarities of the evangelist. It may 
also be questioned whether the per- 
manency of the gathering which is an 
important element of a congregation 
can be predicated of his results. 

It should be remembered further that 
the conditions socially and pyscholog- 
14 



A VARIETY OF APPEALS 

ically under which the truth is now 
proclaimed are vastly different from 
the days when the accepted doctrines 
had so much force. Life is infinitely 
busier and there are many more meth- 
ods of satisfying the social instincts of 
the people. The telephone, electric car, 
rural delivery, the automobile have in 
a large degree rendered obsolete the 
church gathering as a place for social 
intercourse so much needed by man. 
The old element of fear too, upon 
which so much of the appeal of the 
"old gospel" was based, has to a large 
degree ceased to be active in the minds 
of the people. In a certain gathering 
of ministers discussing the question of 
church growth a very active and suc- 
cessful preacher and pastor said: "I 
used to be able to secure conversions 
every time I preached on hell. Now 
I preach on the subject and secure no 
results whatever." The truth is that 
much of the success of the old type of 
preaching was due to its appeal to 
15 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

future punishment, a thing which if 
we are to believe the actions of Chris- 
tians to-day is of very little strength 
in their consciousness. One very sel- 
dom sees any manifestation of the old 
concern on the part of Christians over 
the "lost" condition of their children 
or their friends. 

Let us again repeat: We are not 
concerned with the validity of the doc- 
trines summed up in the phrase 
"preaching the old gospel" or in the 
validity of any of the doctrines or 
principles upon which the church has 
insisted. We are simply stating that 
with changed social conditions and the 
absence of a fear motive persons are 
not generally rushing to hear them 
preached. 

Pastoral Visiting 

Another method of gathering a con- 
gregation has in some quarters been 
insisted upon with considerable em- 
phasis. It is that of pastoral visiting. 
16 



A VARIETY OF APPEALS 

By this we do not mean that ministry 
of comfort and assistance to those who 
are in sorrow, sickness, or trouble of 
whatever sort. This is a Christian ob- 
ligation, whether it result in a congre- 
gation or not, an obligation fulfilled in 
the usual case without any thought of 
such reward. We refer to the personal 
visit of the minister to those in the 
community who are not attendants at 
the service in order to induce their at- 
tendance. Relying in the outset on the 
preaching of his new ideas of truth and 
worship for the gathering of his ad- 
herents, John Wesley very quickly 
found it expedient to declare: "And 
what avails public preaching alone 
though we could preach like angels? 
We must; yea, every traveling preacher 
must instruct the people from house to 
house." In accordance with this ideal, 
his preachers made much of visiting the 
homes of the community, giving spirit- 
ual advice and warning to all persons 
thus met; and to this day the Methodist 
17 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

Church asks of all who enter her min- 
istry, "Will you visit from house to 
house?" Like the preaching of the 
doctrines which it enforced, this new 
method of attack was successful be- 
cause it took into account the condi- 
tions of the times. 

What were the conditions thus favor- 
able to pastoral visiting as a means of 
congregation-building? Several may be 
mentioned. The large degree of sanc- 
tity attached to the minister. His 
education and peculiar office secured 
for him from the large part of the 
population a respectful hearing. The 
scarcity of books and newspapers and 
the rare visits of strangers added to 
the social value of his visits. These 
things gave the minister an entree to 
the home and a welcome to the com- 
munity. The stage of religion on the 
part of the people was that of primi- 
tive credulity; faith resting chiefly upon 
an authority which makes appeal to no 
argument, but merely to the mind's 
18 ' 



A VARIETY OF APPEALS 

natural and primitive credulity. Such 
a state is one in which men will quite 
freely discuss spiritual experiences and 
quite freely lay bare and touch each 
other's souls. Fear too as a motive 
was not entirely conquered, and all 
these combined to make the new 
method an available one. 

Here too conditions have changed, 
and in the change pastoral visiting has 
been robbed of a great degree of its 
effectiveness. Some churches, pictur- 
ing in their action the natural con- 
servatism of the church, will still insist 
upon a minister "who is a pastor/ 5 but 
in spite of such insistence it is evident 
that under present conditions pastoral 
visiting is robbed of much of its use- 
fulness as an agency in increasing the 
congregation. 

First, it is no longer supported by 
the old idea of the sanctity of the min- 
ister. More and more the ministry is 
becoming a profession as men are be- 
ginning to recognize the sacredness of 
19 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

all callings. The visit from the pastor 
has become a professional thing, a busi- 
ness act, and is no longer conceived of 
as a thing disinterested. 

Second, pastoral visiting is increas- 
ingly inefficient and that for two rea- 
sons. The "old primitive credulity has 
given way to a type of religious feeling 
which, calm and spontaneous, is the 
possession of people in many stages of 
culture, thoroughly normal and sane, 
who believe themselves to have an im- 
mediate apprehension of a larger life 
encircling theirs/' To such the rude 
uncovering of deep spiritual feeling, the 
laying bare of the soul is obnoxious. 
Consequently, the old type of expe- 
rience meeting has decayed. To such 
the pastor may come once with his 
probe and his insistence upon church 
attendance. That is his professional 
duty. But to repeat that call and that 
urge soon changes to nagging, and the 
result aimed at is defeated. The in- 
efficiency is further displayed by the 
20 



A VARIETY OF APPEALS 

fact that the method makes too much 
of a demand on the time of the pastor. 
Even if all his energies were devoted 
to the task, it would require more time 
and energy than the pastor can give 
to meet the requirement of his own 
field without touching the broader field 
of the passively religious. 

Religious Publicity 
In our day a comparatively new 
force has been called to the aid of 
preaching and pastoral visiting to se- 
cure for the church the hearing which 
is felt needed for the truth. We refer 
to the growth of advertising and the 
tendency to use this new force in 
Christian propaganda. It remains for 
us to examine the grounds upon which 
this new force is presented as a means 
of propaganda in the building of a 
congregation, the methods of its present 
use, and the reasons, if any, through 
which we may hope for its success 

The hopes of those who have advo- 
21 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

cated publicity as a means of congre- 
gation attraction grow (1) out of the 
marvelous success attending the use of 
such newspaper publicity in the busi- 
ness world; (&) out of the sense of 
need arising from the falling congrega- 
tions in the second place; and (3) out 
of the realization of the fact that in 
the newspapers and magazines is of- 
fered an avenue of approach to the 
masses of the passively religious who 
have closed their ears to the sermon 
subject and their doors to pastoral 
visitation. These grounds it would 
seem are valid. Great businesses have 
been developed through publicity. New 
inventions and little-known — some- 
times almost useless — products have 
been given a wide sale. Such business 
enterprises as the Curtis Publishing 
Company and such articles as talking 
machines are witnesses to the power of 
publicity in the realm of business. The 
opinions of the masses of the people 
have been molded by publicity, as wit- 
22 



A VARIETY OF APPEALS 

ness England's recruiting of her army. 
Congregations are growing smaller, and 
more and more it would seem that the 
masses are embracing what Donald 
Hankey calls the religion of the in- 
articulate — accepting church virtues 
without articulating them to the 
churches. Newspapers and magazines 
are found in every home, making it 
possible to force, unobtrusively, but 
none the less insistently, whatever ar- 
ticle or system is admitted into the 
advertising columns into the very pri- 
vacy of individual life. Small wonder 
that in the past few years a number of 
books have been written on the sub- 
ject of religious publicity, and that a 
number of preachers have felt them- 
selves obligated to inform their breth- 
ren and the church of the excellent 
results supposed to have been attained 
through this new method. 

In another section we shall consider 
our belief that this new force may 
eventually be a useful method of at- 
23 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

trading, not audiences simply, but 
congregations to the church. For the 
present let us point out what seems to 
be a just criticism on the method as it 
is being used by the church. The 
criticism is this: Publicity as used is 
not tending toward building up con- 
gregations, but tends, rather, to the 
disintegration of congregations, since it 
puts its main emphasis upon some- 
thing which is but a temporary and 
unessential feature of the church gath- 
erings. 

The distinction between an audience 
and a congregation made at the outset 
of this study must here be kept in 
mind. The population, and especially 
that part of it which is passively re- 
ligious, must not only be attracted to 
the church, but must be attracted in 
such a way as to be permanently at- 
tached to its services. This implies 
two considerations. First, the impulse 
given to attend the service must be 
such as shall create an expectancy in 
24 



A VARIETY OF APPEALS 

harmony with the worshipful purpose 
of the church. And, second, the im- 
pulse must be such as to arouse an 
expectancy which the church will have 
no difficulty in permanently satisfying. 
Putting the matter in another form, 
we may say that the church cannot 
indefinitely manufacture ' "red-letter" 
days and "special" services; cannot 
continually put the emphasis on the 
special music or sermon. To do so 
would be finally to rob the church of 
its essentially religious character and 
put it into competition with a host of 
agencies like the Lyceum Bureau, the 
opera house, the picture theater, etc., 
which are better equipped for such 
service, and which in the end must 
displace the church in their chosen 
field. And growing out of this is the 
fact that, making its appeal to special 
feature, the time must inevitably come 
when a service will be held in which 
these things will be lacking, and as a 
result disappointment caused to a con- 
25 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

stituency trained to look for such spe- 
cial feature. Such a disappointment 
cannot but defeat the very end at 
which the appeal was aimed. 

A careful study of religious display 
advertisements in the public prints, 
and of the announcements made of 
services in the religious columns of 
Saturday papers would lead a candid 
examiner to feel that almost the whole 
appeal of the church in its use of this 
new force is that of special sermon, 
special music, unusual or "timely" 
services. But little attempt is made 
to arouse religious feeling. No adequate 
conception seems prevalent as to the 
permanent elements of the service 
which might be attractive to the 
average reader. The whole tenor is that 
of specialty advertising, and as such is 
calculated to attract audiences possibly, 
but certainly not to develop congrega- 
tions. Crowds may be gathered for the 
time being, but worshipers hardly. 

That this criticism may lodge against 
26 



A VARIETY OF APPEALS 

current methods of religious publicity 
is being made evident by the number 
of warning voices which are beginning 
to make themselves heard and by the 
testimony elicited as to the conse- 
quences resulting from such publicity 
appeals after a stretch of time. Wil- 
liam T. Ellis, writing in a religious 
periodical, says: "I recently asked the 
editor of one of the great denomina- 
tional organs, published in a metropoli- 
tan city, about the work of one of the 
pastors in his communion who is a 
well-known advocate of publicity. 
'Well/ he replied, with a quizzical 
smile, 'Dr. X. competes successfully 
with the other amusement enterprises 
of his neighborhood! 5 Then he pro- 
ceeded to explain that while by high 
pressure and extensive advertising, Dr. 
X. fills his auditorium, especially on 
Sunday evenings, yet he is not building 
up a real church; he merely attracts the 
light-minded transients who still have 
so much conscience or so little courage 
27 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

that they are unwilling to break en- 
tirely with the traditional habit of 
church-going. Dr. X.'s previous pas- 
torate was, so my informant continued, 
of the same sort; but he left for his suc- 
cessor a mere shell of a church, and the 
man who followed him has had a sor- 
rowful time. Dr. X. had by methods 
that are bizarre and sensational at- 
tracted audiences, but he had not built 
up a congregation. " This is almost 
identical with our criticism, and the 
testimony could be duplicated from 
other sources. Our contention is not 
indeed that, as Mr. Ellis seems to 
think, all the present use of publicity 
is according to bizarre and sensational 
methods, but that the appeal is made 
to a wrong, that is, a nonreligious, ele- 
ment or desire in humanity, and that 
from the side of the service the em- 
phasis is placed upon elements that are 
unessential. 



28 



III. A BASIS FOR APPEAL 

Accepting these criticisms upon the 
present mode of religious publicity, it 
remains to inquire whether this force, 
having, as it does, so free an entrance 
to the minds and homes of the passively 
religious, may be so used as to appeal 
to permanent religious elements, and to 
appeal in such a way as to furnish an 
incentive which attendance at church 
services can continuously satisfy. To 
this question, it is our belief, an affirm- 
ative answer can be given. If the mo- 
tives underlying religious action be dis- 
covered, and the appeal be directed 
to those motives in harmony with 
church practice and purpose, we feel 
that publicity may be a very useful 
agent in gathering congregations for 
the church. 

Religious action of whatever sort is a 
species of behavior, and as such the un- 
derlying forces may be investigated and 
29 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

more or less definitely formulated. Just 
as the investigator of animal action 
may get a clear idea of the force of 
hunger in producing animal action, so 
the investigator of religious behavior 
may secure a knowledge — not so ac- 
curate, certainly, since the conditions 
of the experiment cannot be so surely 
regulated — of the forces which may 
enter into or may be employed in pro- 
ducing religious action. Among the 
forces producing such religious action 
we may cite Social Solidarity, Moral 
Feeling, and the Sense of Life's In- 
completeness. These factors in their 
various ramifications may be appealed 
to in turn in the building up of congre- 
gations. Let us examine them in a 
little closer detail. 

Social Solidarity 

Men tend to act in crowds. It is 

the very unusual individual indeed who 

is strong enough to break social tabu 

by defying the customs made valid by 

30 



A BASIS FOR APPEAL 

the majority. That action which in 
the past has been, or has seemed to be, 
most helpful in securing human wants 
either of food or pleasure of any kind 
is the action upon which mankind sets 
the mark of approval and establishes 
as a custom. The various tabus illus- 
trate this, and it is further seen in the 
fact that to act alone renders one con- 
spicuous and is therefore disagreeable; 
to act as others are acting is acceptable 
and even pleasant. To eat one's lunch 
in a crowded railway car is distasteful, 
but to eat in the dining car where 
others are doing the same thing is not 
at all objectionable. The reasons for 
such action are a special subject for 
psychology and do not here concern us. 
But it is evident that men act reli- 
giously in much the same fashion as in 
other customs. Those systems which 
have survived because of their suc- 
cess in attaining religious objectives 
become part of the inheritance of the 
race; and strengthened by tradition and 
31 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

accepted largely on its authority be- 
come the almost instinctive belief of 
whole peoples. Men believe what their 
fathers believed, and a new faith is 
possible only in proportion as it as- 
sumes the terms of the old or is more 
or less incorporated with the old be- 
liefs, adding its leaven to the old, but 
not, except after long periods, entirely 
supplanting it. Christianity was 
grafted upon Judaism, then later on 
Grecian and Roman ideas, and in its 
missionary propaganda is accepted even 
now only in concept of the old gods of 
the races to whom Christianity is 
presented. To the old ideas are added 
the new concepts of Christianity, mak- 
ing in the process what may be called 
a new faith. The voice of the people 
is in a real sense the voice of God, since 
the voice of the people is the utterance 
of the consensus of the race, a consen- 
sus which determines the action of the 
race deity. It will be seen that here is 
the justification of the statement in a 
32 



A BASIS FOR APPEAL 

previous paragraph that it is not pos- 
sible to classify a population strictly 
on the line of saint and sinner. The 
classification must be effected along the 
line of activity or passivity in the reli- 
gion accepted by the population as a 
whole. 

Now the significance of these facts 
for our study is here: that the indi- 
vidual thought is more or less a matter 
of the race thought; that the individual 
conscience is a picture, possibly more 
or less blurred in outline, of the general 
community conscience. That is wrong 
which the consensus of opinion makes 
tabu and that is right which has be- 
come an established custom. To ar- 
raign, then, a man at the bar of his 
own conscience is powerful, but to ar- 
raign a man at the bar of the public or 
social conscience is to bring him into a 
court from which little appeal can be 
made. The problem of church at- 
tendance from this point of view is 
not that of enriching or varying the 
33 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

service with special feature, but the 
greater problem of making the indi- 
vidual feel that regardless of the char- 
acter of the service he is conforming to 
the decision of the majority when he 
becomes an attendant at church wor- 
ship, 

Moeal Feeling 

The basis of all society is solidarity 
and reciprocity — the sense of the unity 
of the race and the sense that each 
individual in the race must so act as 
to contribute his part to the racial 
success in order that he himself may 
obtain the fullest opportunity for de- 
velopment. From the action of these 
two forces there has resulted what we 
may call moral feeling — in its highest 
expression a compound of emotion and 
intellect. The behavior induced by 
this moral feeling becomes an accepted 
standard of action in the community. 
This moral feeling in its progression is 
divided by Ribot into (1) sympathy, 
34 



A BASIS FOR APPEAL 

(2) altruism or benevolence, (3) the 
sense of justice, (4) the desire for ap- 
probation or for divine and human re- 
wards, and the fear of disapprobation 
and punishments. The sense of fair 
play for the individual, the feeling of 
pity for those in suffering, the in- 
sistence on honesty in business deal- 
ings, the demand for truthfulness in 
social relations; all these things so 
thoroughly incorporated as they are 
into our present civilization are the 
final expressions of reciprocity and 
solidarity. 

It will be noticed that this moral 
feeling is not to be confounded with 
organized religion, which may be — and 
sometimes has been — decidedly im- 
moral. The probabilities are that these 
virtues would have become a part of 
society had there been no such thing 
as an organized religion. There have 
been men, who, to use Eibot's phrase, 
were "discoverers in morals — men who 
in moral disposition were far in advance 
35 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

of their contemporaries and who in- 
itiated and promoted reform in this 
department." These men may have 
been — frequently were — founders of 
systems that in the process of time 
have assumed all the prerogatives and 
forms of organized religion. The point 
we make is that moral feeling may 
exist, and has at times existed, apart 
from organized religion and certainly 
prior to and apart from our Christian 
system. 

It is true, of course, that in our 
present day moral actions are the 
things insisted upon as the expression 
of religious experience, but it is also 
true that these moral feelings are a 
part of the life of that great part of 
the population which is only passively 
religious, and that in this part of the 
population these feelings even to-day 
exist in separation from our organized 
faith. The gathering of men into the 
camps has given religious workers an 
opportunity to more closely observe the 
36 



A BASIS FOR APPEAL 

moral feelings of the nation, and the 
general expression of these observers 
seems to be in harmony with Donald 
Hankey in A Student in Arms, when, 
after describing a conversation among 
the soldiers, he says: "[I heard] enough 
to convince me that the soldiers — and 
in this case the soldier is the working- 
man — does not in the least connect the 
things that he really believes in with 
Christianity. He thinks that Chris- 
tianity consists in believing the Bible 
and setting yourself up to be better 
than your neighbors. By believing the 
Bible he means believing that Jonah 
was swallowed by the whale. By set- 
ting up to be better than your neighbor 
he means not drinking, not swearing, 
and preferably not smoking, being 
close-fisted with money, avoiding the 
companionship of doubtful characters, 
and refusing to acknowledge that such 
have any claim upon you. . . . [The 
soldiers] were men who believed abso- 
lutely in the virtues of unselfishness, 
37 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

generosity, charity, humility, without 
ever connecting them in their minds 
with Christianity; and what they did 
associate with Christianity was just on 
a par with the formalism and smug 
self-righteousness which Christ spent 
his whole life trying to destroy. 5 ' He 
says, further: "The men had deep- 
seated beliefs in goodness, and the only 
reason they did not pray and go to the 
communion was that they never con- 
nected the goodness in which they be- 
lieved with the God in whom the 
chaplains said they ought to believe." 
And Hankey's conclusion seems to us 
a correct one when he says that the 
church "must begin by showing that 
Christianity is the explanation and the 
justification and the triumph of all that 
they do now really believe in; . . . 
must make men see that creeds and 
prayers and worship are symbols of all 
that they admire most and want most 
to be." 



38 



A BASIS FOR APPEAL 

The Incompleteness of Life 
According to the analysis of the 
moral feeling which we have quoted 
from Ribot, the last degree of that 
feeling is the desire to secure divine or 
human approbation and to escape dis- 
approbation and punishment. If this 
desire fail of realization, a sense of dis- 
appointment and of moral pain will 
result. We say moral pain because the 
pain not only will be the punishment 
feared, but that deeper pain we call 
remorse. It will be the result of a 
sense of loss in the failure to reach the 
ideal set by the moral feeling, and it 
will be intensified by the memory pic- 
tures of the struggles which must again 
be undergone in order to regain the 
thing lost through the failure. Man is 
ever pushed on by his desires, and is as 
constantly restrained by the forces 
about him. The conflict eventuates in 
the formation of an ideal of life for him- 
self and others; an ideal which his con- 
39 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

stant failure to reach only makes the 
more desirable. It is the formation of 
a picture of what mankind ought to be 
— a picture whose details have been 
softened and harmonized by centuries 
of human history. The ideal has but 
once been realized, and out of the uni- 
versal failure to realize it, and the 
memories of the struggle which those 
failures have involved, arise such va- 
rious forms of moral pain as grief, re- 
morse, ambition, aspiration, desires for 
friendship, for immortality, etc. Man 
desires to be rich, but by force of cir- 
cumstances must in the average remain 
poor. Man desires that his friendships 
shall continue, but death intervenes or 
misunderstanding terminates it. Man 
wants pleasure, but the strict codes of 
the community and of his class, togeth- 
er with the increasing difficulty of se- 
curing a livelihood, make pleasure rare. 
He desires success in his business or 
profession, but it constantly eludes him. 
Small wonder, then, that there always 
should be the sense of shortcoming and 
40 



A BASIS FOR APPEAL 

the consciousness of life's incomplete- 
ness in human hearts. Small wonder 
also that in all ages men have devised 
systems which by various methods of 
mediation seemed to promise the attain- 
ment of the ideal and the completion of 
life's desires either in this or some 
future world. 

This consciousness of the incomplete- 
ness of life, the sense of needs that are 
unsatisfied, of suffering that is inex- 
plicable, of empty spaces in everyday 
experiences, is as potent in the life of 
the passively religious as in those who 
find an answer to them in religious ac- 
tivity. It is life fuller and larger that 
they need, and religion in its highest 
motive is designed to supply just that 
need. To put the worshiper in harmony 
with life, to reconcile the individual to 
his universe, to fill up the waste and 
empty spaces — those are the very 
things which religion claims as its su- 
preme mission. Moreover, seeking 
those things in the church and finding 
41 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

only the husks of special solo or bizarre 
and unusual sermon subject, men will 
turn from the church to such places 
as they may feel will best meet these 
needs in their life. 



42 



IV. THE APPEAL UTILIZED 

Can these elements of the life of 
the passive part of the population, 
which are so closely allied to the reli- 
gious impulses, be effectively appealed 
to in religious publicity? Can the ap- 
peal to special feature now so common 
be shifted to an appeal to the more 
permanent elements in social consti- 
tution? 

1. Advertising may be made to ap- 
peal to the principle of social solidarity. 
In our consideration of this principle 
we saw that the social conscience is a 
more potent court than that of the in- 
dividual conscience. At present church 
attendance is largely a matter of indi- 
vidual preference and not of the com- 
munity. The problem is that of taking 
the matter of church attendance out of 
the individual preference and making it 
a matter of social judgment. For the 
preacher to appeal to the individual for 
43 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

church attendance is passed over as a 
species of professional activity. For 
the attendant at the service to urge its 
consideration is to put the matter as a 
personal idiosyncrasy. But to give it 
the approval of society at large so that 
it shall be as excellent to attend church 
services regularly as it is to be honest 
in business will be to override personal 
inclination and antipathy. Is it pos- 
sible to bring the matter before this 
last and powerful court? 

In a small book entitled High-Mark 
Congregations Henry Gurting gives an 
account of an experiment in advertising 
which is worth study. The church ad- 
vertised was located in a New England 
smaller city, in a "great community of 
well-meaning and respectable people." 
The congregations were relatively small 
and attendance at the service after the 
use of the usual methods of stimulation 
was showing the decline which has been 
so marked a characteristic of church 
life in recent years. The method of 



THE APPEAL UTILIZED 

advertising chosen was in some re- 
spects unique. Small but attractive 
frames were used to display in shop 
windows and elsewhere cards advertis- 
ing the church. A semimonthly paper 
was issued in which the first page was 
given over to a display advertisement 
in behalf of the church, and this paper 
was circulated in the community. After 
the experiment had been carried on a 
sufficient length of time, Mr. Gurting 
says the results are "an actual and 
steady increase in the church's con- 
gregations, an increase considerable, 
enduring, and continuing free from re- 
acting weakness." The significance is 
in two features: first, that the appeal 
of this advertising was directed solely 
to the education of the public con- 
science in the matter of church at- 
tendance. No special feature in the 
church or its services was stressed. The 
church was mentioned only inciden- 
tally, but attendance at the church 
services was brought to the bar of 
45 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

public conscience and there received a 
favorable verdict. This was the second 
feature — the favorable verdict was not 
dependent upon the character of the 
music or sermon. The increase was not 
miraculous, but it was "considerable, 
enduring, and free from reacting weak- 
ness." 

The writer as matter of experiment 
placed in his church bulletin board 
the following words: 

Sensible People 

go to church 
twice on Sunday — 
Do You? 

It was displayed for three days in a 
small community well churched, and as 
a result of the display not less than a 
dozen persons called upon the writer 
protesting the wording of the card. 
Every one of the persons so protesting 
was a person who habitually neglected 
the church services, and some of them 
46 



THE APPEAL UTILIZED 

had not been in a service for years. 
These people would not have been 
moved by an exhortation to attend 
service. But the words took the mat- 
ter out of their hands and arraigned 
them supposedly before the bar of the 
public; insinuated that they were dif- 
ferent from their fellows, and so 
aroused them to a consideration of the 
advisability of attending the services of 
the church. The appeal in the follow- 
ing advertisement was to the same 
principle, and in company with others 
in a similar vein was successful in its 
object: 

Do You Realize 

the meaning of last week's state- 
ment that 700 more persons were 
present in our services last month 
than in the same month last year? 
It means that your friends are 
finding our services pleasant, 
helpful, friendly. Meet your 
friends there next Sunday and be 
helped by the service. 

Methodist Episcopal Church. 
47 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

2. Religious publicity may be given 
a definite force by an appeal to the 
moral feeling in a community. While 
it is true that in a strict sense morality 
is not religion, and that the actions we 
have discussed under the head of moral 
feeling may arise independently of reli- 
gion, it is at the same time true that 
to-day religion is functioning in actions 
that are moral. More and more the 
stress of faith is being placed upon 
matters of moral action, and the depth 
and sincerity of religious profession are 
being judged by its expression in moral 
and ethical deed. Sympathy, benevo- 
lence, justice, fair dealing, honesty, etc. 
— these things to the average church- 
goer are almost synonymous with reli- 
gion, though, as we saw above, to the 
outsider they are simply the common 
obligation of life and not at all articu- 
lated with the church. If in the minds 
of the masses these virtues can be tied 
up with the idea of the church, they 
will be of value to religious propaganda. 
48 



THE APPEAL UTILIZED 

The various means of publicity, enter- 
ing into the privacy of the home and 
having the ear of the reader in his 
quiet moments, furnish the means and 
can carry a message which will suggest 
that this common morality is a very 
definite part of the life of the church, 
and that, desirable as it is, is best 
secured in effort through the activity 
of the church. That this appeal may 
be made through the press and other 
publicity agencies may be seen in the 
following advertisements which have 
appeared in newspapers: 

Examine the Record 
of over one hundred years of con- 
tinuous service of the Methodist 
church in this community. You 
will find it has always stood for 
the things that help the common 
people. It deserves your support. 

Convince Yourself 
of the helpfulness of its work and 
the excellence of its services by 
being present next Sunday. 
Methodist Episcopal Church 
—The— Church— That— Serves— 
49 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

1801 1917 

116 Years of Continuous History 

There must be something worth while in 
an organization that lasts as long as that. 
That something is: This church has min- 
istered impartially to all classes. It has 
been a church for all the people. Consider- 
ing all men equally entitled to its privi- 
leges, it has stood insistently for an honest 
worship of God and has welcomed all who 
sought to help their fellows. To belong to 
such an institution is at once an obligation 
and a privilege. 

Methodist Episcopal Church. 

— The — Church — That — Serves— 

The Spirit of Democracy 

Churches like persons have an indi- 
viduality — a definite spirit. The spirit 
of the pioneers who laid broad and 
deep the foundations of Methodism in 
this section was the spirit of Religious 
Democracy. With them every man 
stood on the same footing before God. 
This spirit they bequeathed to their 
successors and is characteristic of our 
church to-day. Our doors stand open 
in genuine friendliness to all who de- 
sire to worship God. 

Methodist Episcopal Church. 
50 



THE APPEAL UTILIZED 

3. However, it is in the sense of the 
incompleteness of life that there will 
be found the largest opportunity for 
appeal through religious publicity. Re- 
ligion purports to be a ministry to just 
those lacunae which we have seen are 
part of the experiences of men. These 
vacant spaces in life furnish the reason 
for religion. To comfort in sorrow, to 
render full the empty life, to atone for 
failure of ambition, to assure a future 
realization of the unsatisfied aspiration 
— these are the promises of the faith 
most widely preached. It would seem 
that with so extensive a need on the part 
of men, and such a full supply for those 
needs in the possession of the church, 
there would be a greater appeal to these 
elements than can be found in the va- 
rious attempts at religious publicity. 

In his study of advertising Professor 
H. L. Hollingworth has made an in- 
vestigation into the force of certain 
incentives which may be used in ad- 
vertising. Fifty different appeals were 
51 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

given to a group of forty observers who 
arranged the appeals in a final order of 
merit as they impressed the observer. 
This final order he gives in a table of 
values of the appeals and incentives. 
The table begins with health as the 
strongest appeal possible and continues 
on through a list of thirty incentives. 
In the order of strength his appeals 
fall into three groups, classified on the 
basis of the strength of the appeal. [In 
the first group are those that "are 
strictly relevant in tone, describe some 
specific value, quality, or selling point." 
In other words, the appeal is a personal 
appeal to the actual or supposed need 
of the individual. The second group 
consists of those "appeals which try to 
connect the article with some specific 
instinct or effective conception. They 
are less personal, but more social than 
the first group." In the third group — 
that which has the least force of all — 
"the feeling appealed to is indetermi- 
nate and general." He says: "Taking 
52 



THE APPEAL UTILIZED 

the table as it stands, the various in- 
stincts and interests there represented 
stand in their order of strength so far 
as they may serve as the basis of ap- 
peal in business transaction regardless 
of the commodity offered. ... It is 
only necessary to begin at the top of 
the list and select the first appeal 
which could be applied to the descrip- 
tion of the commodity in question. 
This, then, will constitute the strongest 
appeal which can be made in the in- 
terest of that commodity." 

The thing of unusual interest for us 
in these conclusions of Hollingworth is 
that the strongest basis of appeal is 
found in the personal and instinctive 
needs of the individual. As far as re- 
ligion is concerned these needs are the 
things which will make life more com- 
plete. Here, then, is a strong basis for 
any appeal that we may make. That 
these things can be worked out in 
religious publicity the following adver- 
tisements bear witness: 
53 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 



Spend Sunday 
Healthfully 



Get mental stimulus, bodily com- 
fort and spiritual help by regular 
attendance at the services of the 

Methodist episcopal 
Church 

The Church That Serves 



iwiiiiiiiiiiiininnniiniiffliimiiMin™ 



| Does 

| 

| Sunday 

i 

I Count? 



Does Sunday with you count for sue- 1 

cess? Does it help you think clearly §| 

and live better? g 

You can make Sunday count for some- | 

thing by attending the services of our = 

church. The series of sermons on "Get- §f 

ting the Most Out of Life," which is g 

being preached in the evening, are es- W 

pecially planned to help you to success. = 

10:30 "With Open Eyes." 

7:30 "The Rules of the I 

Game" 
(3d sermon of series) 



Methodist Episcopal Church 

The Church That Serves. 

IflllUiflUIllIIIUlUJlUIIi™ 



54 



THE APPEAL UTILIZED 

J . i 

A Personal Attitude 

Toward Life 

"My body needs food, my soul needs God. I will be as 
fair to my soul as to my body. I will work for my daily 
bread and on Sunday I will be found twice a day in a 
church service, where the helpful sermons and pervading 
spirit of worship will be to my soul what food is to my body. 

10:30— -"The Meaning of Life.'' 
7:30— "If." 

Methodist Episcopal Church 

The Church That Serves 



Week After Week 

Hundreds of hearts and homes are made 
brighter and cheerier by the inspiration 
towards better living received at our 
services. They have appreciated the wel- 
come, enjoyed the fellowship, been prof- 
ited by the sermons. Try it for yourself. . 

10:30, Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. 
7:30, "The Final Judgment." 

Methodist Episcopal Church 

The Church That Serves 



55 




BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 



THAT FAMILY 
OF YOURS 

deserves the very best you have. Give them 
the best thing you can, the heritage of a good 
name. You will find our services very help- 
ful in securing that character which must be 
back of every good name. Let us help you 
thro our services on Sunday. 

Methodist Episcopal Church 

The Church That Serves 



56 



V. CONCLUSION 

It must not be supposed that the re- 
ligious publicity here outlined will be a 
magic wand useful in the creation of 
assemblies. On the contrary, for any 
particular and special service an- 
nounced it will fail to produce the 
crowds that the usual type of church 
announcements might obtain. Such 
customary publicity makes its appeal 
to a desire for sensation, and to a type 
of persons, actively religious, who may 
be swayed from one church to another; 
and so such publicity may for a par- 
ticular service secure a larger hearing. 
The obtaining of crowds, however, is 
not the main object of the type of 
publicity we have been considering. 
Its purpose is to touch the great mass 
of the passively religious by the in- 
direct method of printed suggestion. 
Its purpose is that in the minds of 
these passively religious the church 
57 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

may be so connected with the ordinary 
virtues of life and with the permanent 
religious elements of society as to 
produce a constituency, recruited from 
the passive part of society, which will 
have a continuous trend toward church 
attendance and so have a permanent 
character which is the very opposite of 
the crowd. 

Furthermore, such religious publicity 
will have in it a much larger degree of 
that vicarious element which inheres in 
all publicity than is found in the usual 
announcement of special service, spe- 
cial music, etc. By vicarious element 
we mean the indirect effect which the 
advertising of one kind of article has in 
increasing the sale of another article 
similar in kind but different in name. 
No particular brand of soap, for ex- 
ample, may be advertised extensively 
without indirectly stimulating the sales 
of other brands of soap, so no religious 
publicity for a particular church but 
what will indirectly stimulate the in- 
58 



CONCLUSION 

terest in the other churches in the 
locality. Probably in the ordinary type 
of religious publicity the vicarious ele- 
ment is reduced to a minimum while in 
the publicity which makes its appeal 
to fundamental elements in the reli- 
gious nature the vicarious element must 
of necessity be large. Such vicarious 
element ought not to be thought ob- 
jectionable. In these days we have 
largely forgotten the boundaries that 
separate us into various camps known 
as denominations. Our chief thought 
is for the Kingdom, and it is for the 
extension of the Kingdom rather than 
the aggrandizement of any particular 
denomination that we are most con- 
cerned; so that if a side product of 
our publicity be the stimulation of 
other churches in addition to our own, 
we still rejoice. Even with this vi- 
carious element it is still true that 
religious publicity appealing to the re- 
ligious elements of the population will 
give a full return for the outlay. A 
59 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

clientele of regular church attendants 
will be developed for the advertising 
church which will be an adequate re- 
turn for the thought, labor, and funds 
expended. 

The purpose of this study is not to 
discuss the technic of advertisements, 
but solely to discover a suitable basis 
for appeal. But in connection with the 
consideration of the vicarious element 
of the publicity a reference to a certain 
phase of that technic may be in place 
here. Should there be those who con- 
sider the vicarious element of such 
publicity objectionable, it will still be 
possible for such to overcome that 
vicariousness to a considerable degree 
by the exercise of thought in the work- 
ing out of the wording of their appeal. 
There is a law of thought that we, in 
general, think from a particular thing 
to the general class to which the thing 
belongs. We think from the particular 
Methodist or Lutheran, to the general 
class church. But it is also true that 
60 



CONCLUSION 

we are forward and not backward 
thinking beings. Starting with the let- 
ter B we tend to say C rather than A. 
From a careful use of these laws we 
may, indeed, produce advertisements 
which will largely, unless the applica- 
tion is carried too far, eliminate the 
vicarious element. To great masses of 
people all talking machines are Vic- 
trolas, all cameras are Kodaks. So 
insistently have the advertisers of these 
products used the law of forward 
thinking, placing the general class first 
and the particular thing last, that they 
have brought it to pass that men think 
of the particular whenever the "general 
class is mentioned. And now these 
concerns must exercise a careful atten- 
tion so that the advertisement be di- 
rected to show that not all phono- 
graphs are Victors and not all cameras 
Kodaks. In the same way too it ought 
to be possible for those who feel that 
the vicarious element is objectionable 
to so arrange their publicity that the 
61 



BUILDING THE CONGREGATION 

vicarious element will be to a large 
degree eliminated and to make men 
think from the general idea of church 
to the particular idea of their own local 
denomination. 

The proof of the pudding is in the 
eating. With church membership 
barely holding its own in the increas- 
ing population, with the church con- 
fronted with the problem of the amal- 
gamation of the men who will come 
back from our armed forces liberalized 
and with vastly enlarged social stan- 
dards, some method must be devised 
to create a new drift to the churches. 
We believe that the recognition of the 
elements of power in the publicity we 
have outlined will provide such a 
method. Ill pleased with the usual 
methods of church publicity — adver- 
tising the church almost as one would 
a vaudeville theater or a moving pic- 
ture place — the writer wrought out his 
own method to the satisfaction of his 
own conscience and the enrichment of 
62 



CONCLUSION 

his congregations. A churchgoing con- 
stituency which did not depend on 
chance or special feature, a constit- 
uency which grew slowly but surely 
through the years of experiment and 
which has continued after a new field 
of labor was entered upon, was the 
outcome of the method in practice. In 
a field rendered difficult by denomi- 
national competition and slow to move 
because of the traditional inertia of 
the smaller community, it was success- 
ful, not sensationally but consistently; 
and now in a new field of larger possi- 
bilities and with diverse problems and 
population it gives every promise of 
proving equal to its task as in the 
first sphere of its efforts. 



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